Chapter 16: The Fractured Cell
The world didn’t come back online with a hum. It returned as a jagged scream of shearing metal and a strobing hell of emergency red lights.
Bucky’s vibranium fist punched through the fractured wall a second time. The transparent material exploded inward in a cascade of dull, pebbled shards. He didn’t feel them. He was already turning, dropping to his knees beside Sage.
She hadn’t moved. She lay on her back where he’d left her, the torn jumpsuit gaping, the sensor mesh glowing faintly against her skin in the bloody light. Her eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling high above where a broken skylight showed a slice of night. They weren’t blank like before. They were shattered. Full of a comprehension so vast and terrible it had simply unplugged her from her body.
“Sage.” His voice was sandpaper. He reached for her, his hands hovering, unsure where to land without causing more damage. “We have to move. Come on.”
She didn’t blink. A fine tremble ran through her limbs, a mechanical shivering. He grabbed the torn fabric of her jumpsuit and yanked it closed over her chest, his movements frantic, clumsy. He found the fasteners and sealed them, covering her. It felt pathetic, a mockery of modesty after what he’d done.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the words useless, toxic. “I’m so sorry. We have to go now.”
From the main lab area, shouts of confusion were cut short by the wet, final sounds of efficient violence. A shape moved through the strobe-lit haze—all white bandages and swirling cape, a crescent-headed staff cutting through the red gloom. Moon Knight.
He moved like a vengeful rumor. A technician lunged with a shock rod. Marc didn’t block it. He took the hit on his forearm, let the energy crackle over the wrappings, and drove the end of his staff into the man’s throat. There was a crunch. The man dropped.
“Lockley’s on the west door,” Marc’s voice growled, a distortion of several tones. “Grant’s locating the primary data core. The bird is… watching.” He reached the shattered cell, his masked face tilting down at Bucky trying to rouse Sage. His posture shifted, a slight stiffening. “What’s her status?”
“She’s not here,” Bucky said, desperation clawing up his throat. He slid his arms under Sage, preparing to lift her. “Catatonic. We need Sam, we need evac.”
“Negative.” The voice was flatter now. Jake Lockley was in the driver’s seat. “The pulse fried short-range comms. Sam’s holding the LZ. We fight our way out.” He looked past them, into the shadows at the rear of the lab. “The Pharmacist is mine.”
The Pharmacist had not panicked. He stood by his dead console, calmly injecting a vial of clear fluid into his own carotid. His eyes, when they found Jake’s, were sharp, fascinated. “The autonomic override was only Layer One,” he called out, his voice carrying over the alarm. “The gestation protocol has been initiated. It cannot be stopped by cutting power. It is biochemical. A seed has been planted.”
Bucky froze, Sage half-lifted in his arms. A cold deeper than space opened inside his gut.
Jake didn’t hesitate. He flung the crescent dart. It spun end over end, aimed for the Pharmacist’s forehead.
The man moved with unnatural, fluid speed. The dart buried itself in the wall where his head had been. He was fast. Super-soldier fast. The vial had been a trigger.
“Layer Two,” the Pharmacist said, almost to himself, circling. “Metabolic augmentation. For handling volatile assets.”
Jake charged. They met in the center of the lab in a crash of flesh and fury. It wasn’t a duel; it was a demolition. Jake fought with the street-brawler’s chaos of Lockley—elbows, knees, headbutts. The Pharmacist fought like a surgeon, precise, targeting joints, nerve clusters. He blocked a punch, twisted, and drove a knuckle into a gap in Marc’s armored wrappings. Marc grunted, stumbling back.
He knows the armor. Steven’s panicked voice chimed in their head. He’s studied us.
Shut up and find a weakness! Jake snarled internally, shaking off the pain.
From the side door, Natasha and Sam burst in. Sam’s wings were folded tight for the close quarters, repulsors glowing in his palms. Natasha took in the scene with a single, devastating glance: the shattered cell, Bucky cradling Sage, the two monsters trading blows. Her face hardened into something absolute.
“Barnes, get her to the jet. Now.” She raised her Widow’s Bites. “Sam, keep that thing off him.”
Sam fired. The repulsor blast slammed into the Pharmacist as he was winding up for a kick at Jake’s knee. It knocked him sideways into a bank of servers, sending up a shower of sparks.
Jake pressed the advantage, bringing his staff down in a sweeping arc. The Pharmacist rolled, the staff cracking the concrete where his skull had been. He sprang up, a long, surgical scalpel suddenly in his hand, pulled from his sleeve.
“You are an interesting system,” the Pharmacist said, his breath barely quickened. “Multiple tenants in one flesh. A dilution of purpose. I consolidate.”
He lunged. The scalpel wasn’t for killing. It flickered toward Jake’s eyes, his throat, the seams of his hood—distractions. His other hand shot out, fingers poised like a viper’s strike, aiming for the solar plexus.
Bucky was running, Sage a dead weight in his arms. Her head lolled against his shoulder. Her breath tickled his neck, shallow and fast. He could feel the dampness of tears on her skin. She was in there, trapped behind the glass of her own eyes, feeling everything.
He had to get her out. He had to get the thing inside her out. The Pharmacist’s words were a virus in his brain. A seed has been planted.
He barreled toward the personnel door, now hanging askew on its hinges.
Behind him, the fight turned.
The Pharmacist’s finger-strike landed. Not hard, but in a specific, terrible point just below Jake’s sternum. A pressure point Khonshu’s armor didn’t cover, because it wasn’t supposed to need to.
Agony, white and electric, locked Jake’s diaphragm. He couldn’t breathe. He dropped to one knee.
The Pharmacist raised the scalpel for a finishing thrust to the spine.
A metal arm intercepted it. Bucky had shoved Sage into Natasha’s waiting grasp and launched himself back into the fight. The scalpel screeched along the vibranium plates, deflecting. Bucky drove his forehead into the Pharmacist’s nose.
It broke with a wet snap. The man didn’t cry out. He stumbled back, blood sheeting over his lips and chin, and smiled. A red, ghastly smile.
“Attachment,” he gurgled. “The fatal flaw.”
Sam hit him with a full-power repulsor blast from three feet away. It lifted the Pharmacist off his feet and hurled him through the partition wall into the dark recesses of the warehouse.
“Go!” Sam yelled. “The whole place could have fail-safes!”
Jake gasped, air returning. He staggered up, leaning on his staff. Bucky was already moving back to Natasha and Sage. Together, they fled the red strobe and the spreading fire, into the cool, forgiving darkness of the yard.
The run to the treeline was a blur. Bucky carried Sage again. She’d started to make a sound—a thin, high, endless whine that came from the base of her throat, the sound of a psyche leaking pressure.
The jet’s ramp was down. They piled in. Sam took the pilot’s seat and the engines whined to life before the ramp was fully closed.
The cabin light was clinical, bright. It exposed everything.
Bucky laid Sage on a med-bay gurney. Natasha began cutting away the sensor mesh with careful precision. The whine from Sage’s throat cut off abruptly. She was just staring again, but now a single tear tracked from each eye, cutting paths through the grime on her temples.
Jake—Marc—whoever he was, tore off his cracked mask. He was sweating, pale. He stared at his shaking hands. “He knew where to hit me. He’s read every file. He knows us better than we do.”
“Forget that,” Bucky said, his voice hollow. He was looking at Sage’s abdomen, covered now by a standard-issue SHIELD t-shirt Natasha had put on her. “What did he mean? A seed. Biochemical. What does that mean?”
Tony’s voice crackled over the restored comms, tinny with distance. “I’m analyzing the data dump Grant pulled. It’s… oh, god.”
“Say it,” Bucky demanded.
“She’s modified to be more… fertile. More receptive to pregnancy. We need to get a contraceptive STAT, and we need to keep her as far away from the pharmacist as humanly possible. They were planning on using her to… breed.”
The static from the comms filled the cabin, a hollow buzz that lasted for three full seconds.
Bucky didn’t move. He stared at the comm speaker as if he could see Stark’s face in the grille. The words didn’t rearrange themselves into sense. They just sat there, vile and final. More receptive. Fertile. Breed.
“You’re saying he…” Bucky’s mouth was too dry to finish. He looked down at Sage. At her stomach under the grey cotton shirt.
“I’m saying the protocol he initiated wasn’t just neural,” Tony’s voice came back, strained. “It was a full-system hormonal command. It basically told her body to… get ready. To accept. The pulse we hit them with didn’t touch that. It’s already in her bloodstream.”
Natasha’s hands, which had been securing a bio-monitor to Sage’s wrist, stilled. Her expression was carved from ice. “A contraceptive. Now. What do we have on board?”
Sam was already rifling through the med-kit strapped to the bulkhead. “Standard issue. Emergency post-exposure kits.” He pulled out a small, foil-wrapped packet. “Levonorgestrel. One-point-five milligram.”
“Will it work?” Bucky’s voice was a rasp. He was still holding Sage’s other hand. Her fingers were cold.
“Against a tailored biochemical weapon? I have no goddamn idea,” Tony snapped over the comms. “It’s a sledgehammer for a scalpel job. But it’s the only sledgehammer you’ve got for the next twenty minutes. You have to try.”
Natasha took the packet from Sam and tore it open. The pill was small and white. Innocuous. She filled a cup with water from a canteen. “Barnes. Help me sit her up.”
Bucky slid his arm behind Sage’s shoulders, lifting her. Her head rolled back, her eyes still vacant, fixed on the ceiling panels. Natasha pressed the pill to her lips. “Sage. You need to swallow this.”
There was no response. No recognition. Just the slow, even rhythm of her breathing.
“Her swallow reflex might be intact,” Natasha muttered. She tipped a little water into Sage’s mouth, massaging her throat gently. They watched the adam’s apple bob. Most of the water trickled out the side of her mouth, down her chin and onto Bucky’s sleeve. But the pill was gone.
It felt like a pathetic gesture. Throwing a pebble at a tidal wave.
Marc sat heavily on a bench across from the gurney, the wrappings on his chest still smoldering from the shock rod blast. He cradled his ribs where the Pharmacist had struck. “He called me a dilution,” he said, his voice flat. “Multiple tenants. He wanted to consolidate.” A sharp, humorless laugh escaped him. “Jake wants to turn this jet around and scrape him off that wall with a shovel.”
“Join the queue,” Bucky said, his gaze never leaving Sage’s face.
The jet banked smoothly, heading for the compound. The sudden shift in pressure made Sage’s eyelids flutter. A low moan vibrated in her chest, breaking the awful silence. Her eyes slid from the ceiling, focusing on nothing, then slowly, torturously, tracked toward Bucky.
The connection wasn’t clean. It was clouded, fractured. But she was looking at him.
Her lips parted. A whisper, shredded and raw, barely audible over the engines. “You… promised.”
It wasn’t an accusation. It was a statement of fact. A report from a ruined land.
Bucky’s entire body went rigid. The memory was a physical blow: him whispering trust me into her ear before he forced himself inside her. The promise of a window. A chance. He had given her the only thing he could—a horrific, violating act—and framed it as a tactical necessity. He’d made her complicit in her own destruction.
“I know,” he choked out. The words were utterly inadequate. “I’m sorry.”
Her eyes held his. The tears had stopped. Something worse was there now. A glacial, settling clarity. “He said… a seed.” Her hand twitched, as if wanting to move to her abdomen, but it only clenched on the gurney’s sheet. “Is it… in me?”
The cabin was silent. Natasha looked away. Sam focused on the controls. Marc stared at the floor.
“We don’t know,” Bucky forced himself to say. “We gave you something. To stop it.”
Sage’s gaze drifted back to the ceiling. The clarity didn’t fade. It hardened. “A garden,” she murmured, her voice distant. “That’s what he called it. An envarium.” She blinked once, slowly. “For the perfect thing.”
Then she shut down again. But it was different this time. Not a vacant catatonia. It was a deliberate, interior retreat. A door closing softly but firmly in a room full of people.
The jet began its descent. The compound’s lights glowed below them, a grid of false safety.
Tony was waiting in the med-bay, holograms of Sage’s stolen biochemical data already floating in the air. His face was grim. “The pill was a start. Maybe bought us hours. We need to flush her system completely. We need a full dialysis filtration to scrub the protocol agents, and then we need to hit her with a tailored hormone blocker. I’m synthesizing it now. It’ll take ninety minutes.”
“Do it,” Bucky said.
As the medical team transferred Sage to a sterile bed, attaching lines and monitors, she didn’t resist. She watched the ceiling lights streak past, a prisoner being moved to another cell.
Bucky stood in the doorway, feeling the weight of the compound’s sterile air. The Pharmacist was still out there. His work wasn’t undone. It was ticking inside her, a clock made of hormones and stolen biology.
Marc leaned against the wall beside him, the moonlight from a high window painting a silver streak across his battered armor. “He won’t stop,” Marc said, quietly. “He’s a gardener. You don’t abandon a plot you’ve just sown.”
“I know,” Bucky said. His metal fist clenched, the servos whining softly. He looked at Sage, now surrounded by machines that hissed and beeped, fighting a war on a cellular level. He looked at the bruise darkening on Marc’s side, at Natasha’s silent, furious pacing, at Sam’s worried frown.
The momentum wasn’t toward rescue anymore. It was toward a different, darker kind of work.
It was toward a different, darker kind of work.
The sterile light of the med-bay felt like an accusation. Bucky watched the clear fluids snake down tubes into Sage’s arm, a chemical counter-attack against an enemy they couldn’t see. Her stillness was worse now, knowing it was chosen.
“Ninety minutes is a lifetime in a fight,” a voice grunted from the doorway. It was lower, coarser than Marc’s. The man leaning against the frame had shed the top half of his armored wrappings, revealing a sweat-stained shirt and a new, aggressive slouch. The cadence was all wrong.
“Jake,” Bucky stated, not turning.
“The one and only,” Jake Lockley said, pushing off the doorframe and walking in. He moved like he owned the space, a predatory grace that Marc suppressed and Steven didn’t possess. He stopped at the foot of Sage’s bed, his eyes—harder, flintier—scanned the monitors. “So the egghead’s magic flush is cooking. What’s Plan B?”
“This is Plan B,” Natasha said, her arms crossed. She watched Jake like one might watch a suddenly active landmine.
“This is waiting.” Jake jabbed a thumb at the readouts. “Her body’s a battlefield and we’re letting the nerds fight it with pipettes. The guy who did this is picking glass out of his face and thinking of his next move right now.” He turned to Bucky, his gaze direct and uncomfortably perceptive. “You put a bullet in him yet?”
“He got away,” Bucky said, the words tasting of ash.
“Convenient.” Jake’s smile was all teeth. “He’s gotta have a main lab. A greenhouse for his perfect little seedlings.” He leaned closer to Sage, though he spoke to the room. “He called her a scion, right? You don’t keep your prize cuttings in a rustbucket warehouse. You keep ‘em somewhere safe. Controlled.”
Tony’s voice buzzed from a speaker, following the conversation. “The data Grant pulled is fragmented. He’s got a dozen shell companies, PO boxes, dead-end leases. It’s a maze.”
“Then we don’t follow the paper.” Jake straightened up, cracking his neck. “We follow the logic. He wants a perfect baby. He needs more than just her. He needs a whole setup. Medical, secure, long-term.” He looked at Sage’s prone form, his expression unreadable. “He also needs her to survive the pregnancy. That protocol in her blood? It’s not just to make it take. It’s to keep her alive long enough to deliver. He invested too much to let her stroke out from the stress.”
The implication hung in the antiseptic air. The Pharmacist wasn't done with her. He couldn’t be. She was essential.
“You’re saying he might… monitor her vitals? Remotely?” Sam asked, stepping into the room.
“I’m saying he didn’t inject that crap into his neck for fun,” Jake said. “He’s enhanced. Connected. He knows we have her. And he knows if she dies, his project dies.” He paced a short, tight line. “So we use the bait. We let the filter do its thing. And we get ready.”
“For what?” Bucky asked, finally tearing his eyes from Sage.
“For when he comes to check on his investment.” Jake stopped pacing. His focus was absolute, a simmering violence distilled into a plan. “We don’t wait ninety minutes. We move in sixty. We take her somewhere public, somewhere he’d never make a move. A busy hospital, a crowded street. We make it look like we’re transferring her for ‘specialized care.’ We flash her like a shiny diamond in a case.”
Natasha’s eyes narrowed. “You want to use her as a trap. After everything.”
“I want to end this,” Jake corrected, his voice dropping. “He’s in her head and in her blood. You think a dialysis machine fixes that? The only way out is through him. We draw him into the open, on our terms, and we dismantle him. Permanently.”
Bucky looked at Sage. The memory of her whisper—You promised—was a hook in his heart. He had promised a window. A way out. Letting her be used again, even as bait, felt like a second betrayal.
“She’s not a piece on your board, Lockley,” Bucky said, his voice low.
“Right now, she’s the only piece that matters to him,” Jake shot back, getting in Bucky’s space. “That makes her the queen. You want to protect her? Then win the game. Stop reacting and make a play.”
The tension in the room spiked, a silent contest of wills between the soldier drowning in guilt and the mercenary fueled by blunt purpose. The gentle beep-beep-beep of Sage’s heart monitor underscored the silence.
“Fifty-eight minutes,” Tony’s voice chimed in, a neutral referee. “The blocker will be ready. Where, exactly, is this public transfer happening?”
Jake’s eyes never left Bucky’s. “Grand Central Terminal. Main concourse. Midday. Maximum eyes, maximum chaos. He won’t risk a spectacle. But he’ll watch. He’ll have to.”
“And when he shows?” Sam asked.
A cold, unmistakable certainty settled over Jake’s features. It wasn’t Marc’s weary resolve or Steven’s anxious hope. It was the cab driver who knew every dirty street and what happened in the shadows. “He doesn’t get to show. We see him first. We’ve met him. We know his face now. Stark, you feed facial rec to our units. Barnes, you’re with the gurney, you’re the grief-stricken boyfriend, it’ll play. Romanoff, you’re covert sweep. Sam, you’re overwatch from the balconies. I’ll be in the crowd.”
“Doing what?” Natasha asked.
“What I do,” Jake said, as if it were obvious. “Driving. I’ll be the guy yelling about his fare being late. He’ll look right through me.” He finally broke his stare-down with Bucky, turning to leave. “Sixty minutes. Get her ready to move.”
He strode out, leaving a new kind of silence behind him—one charged with dreadful potential.
Bucky slowly sank into the chair beside Sage’s bed. He took her limp hand again. Her skin was cool. “I don’t like it,” he murmured, to her, to himself.
“None of us do,” Natasha said softly. She came to stand beside him. “But he’s not wrong. The Pharmacist is a link in a chain. We need to find the rest of the chain before it tightens.”
On the bed, Sage’s fingers twitched. A minute, muscular spasm. Then, her eyelids fluttered. This time, her gaze found Bucky’s with painful clarity. The drugs were pulling the worst of the shock away, leaving a raw, hyper-aware agony in its place. She’d heard them.
“No more… cages,” she breathed, each word a labor.
“This isn’t a cage,” Bucky whispered, leaning close. “It’s a snare. For him.”
A single, lucid tear welled and spilled over. It held a universe of exhaustion. She gave the faintest nod, a fractional tightening of her fingers around his. It was not consent. It was surrender to the only path left.
It was a green light.
“Fifty-five minutes,” Tony said.
The race was on.